Secrecy
and Reluctant Revelation in the Los Angeles ArchdioceseThe Example of the Rev. Lynn Caffoe File

In the Archdiocese of Los Angeles under Cardinal Roger Mahony, claims
of transparency and complete openness have gone hand-in-hand with secrecy,
partial releases of information, and steadfast refusal to open the files.
The Rev. Lynn Caffoe is a case in point.

The public at large first learned that Caffoe
was an accused priest when the Los Angeles Times published a
major Sunday report, Archdiocese
for Years Kept Allegations of Abuse from Police, by Glenn F. Bunting,
Ralph Frammolino, and Richard Winton, on August 18, 2002. Ten years after
Caffoe had been placed on inactive leave in 1992 because of abuse allegations,
the public finally learned that Caffoe had been accused and removed. The
Times reported a single allegation against Caffoe. That was by
no means the whole story.

But in October-November 2005, the archdiocese released an Addendum
to the Report to the People of God. The Addendum provided
"underlying information" prepared by the archdiocese's lawyers
from descriptions (so-called proffers) of the archdiocesan files that
the court had verified were "complete and accurate." The Addendum
was intended to further the Archdiocese's "commitment to speak honestly
and openly."

But then the Los Angeles Times reported on Caffoe litigation
in Mahony
Accounts of Abuse Case Tape Differ: Plaintiffs Say He Gave the Vatican
a Graver Version of Priest's Role Than He Gave the Public, by John
Spano, on March 20, 2007, and the archdiocese
replied. The Spano article provided the public with its first quotations
from actual documents in the much-contested Caffoe file. When these quotations
were compared with the paraphrases in the 2005 Addendum, it became clear
that the Addendum had not represented the Caffoe file accurately. "Partially
naked" boys in a letter from Mahony to Cardinal Ratzinger requesting
Caffoe's laicization became "fully clothed" in the Addendum.
"Criminal behavior" in the Ratzinger letter was referred to
as "no sexual activity." Hugging and fondling had been rendered
in the Addendum as "inappropriate behavior." And so forth.

Below we reproduce: 1) the Caffoe-related portions
of the 2004 Report to the People of God, 2) the Caffoe-related portions
of the 2005 Addendum to the Report, and 3) the 2007 article on the Caffoe
litigation. The color-coding shows the discrepancies:

A) The Report counted 3 Caffoe accusers. The Addendum described at least
15. These totals are marked with blue lines.

B) The Report's brief descriptions of a few Caffoe allegations are underlined
in green, as are the corresponding passages in the Addendum.
The additional descriptions of allegations in the Addendum are underlined
in red. These allegations were not included in the original
Report.

C) The Addendum purported to describe documents from the Caffoe file.
But the Addendum's descriptions of abuse-related documents from the file
are not consistent with the quotations from those documents in the Caffoe
litigation. A purple line
marks the entries in the Addendum and the comparable quotations in the
Los Angeles Times article about the litigation, and a bold
number allows you to match the entry with the quotation.